Hi Tony et al.,It's kind of a celebrity object right now, and too bright for our CCDs. Plus it's quite unlikely now to show rapid variability, because the "photosphere" is thousands of WD-radii in size (the expanding shell is a big opaque envelope many times bigger than the entire underlying binary). So I'd rather lie low until the shell goes transparent - that's when we can first see down to the inner binary. Roughly speaking, that's when the soft X-rays first appear, or *very* roughly when the nova falls about 5 mag. Others will study this object pretty well, now that it has hit the headlines.
That's all premised on the assumption that it's "just another nova". I haven't seen any evidence yet that it's something different... but the sky is full of surprises!
The stars that I'd mainly like to promote this month are V1101 Aql and GD 552 ("Cep 1") in the north... BW Scl in the far south... and V1432 Aql and V1494 Aql (Nova Aquilae 1999 - now *that* was a sight to see!) for any conceivable hemisphere.
Oh yes, one more, speaking of novae: HR Del. A nice bright star that has been strangely neglected (by us, too) in time-series photometry. There are some hints of multiple periodicities in the historical record. Porb is around 5 hours, so this star does need quite long nightly runs. But it's mighty bright, and for small scopers could be a great, great target.
joe On 8/16/2013 1:05 PM, Anthony J. Kroes wrote:
Are we interested in this object? One of my astronomy club members sent me the link below and also a picture he took early this morning - a wide field shot with a DSLR camera which easily caught the Nova at about magnitude 5. http://www.universetoday.com/104103/bright-new-nova-in-delphinus-you-can-see -it-tonight-with-binoculars/#more-104103 Tony Kroes ____________________________________________________________ Center for Backyard Astrophysics (CBA) mailing lists https://cbastro.org/communications/mailing-lists/
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